Russian video shows one phone running two versions of Android

If you’ve ever flashed an Android ROM before, you know it can either be a great experience or send you screaming back to your stock experience. What if you could just run that ROM in a service like Parallels and switch to it whenever you wanted to try something new? If you believe the video above, that’s exactly what a couple of St. Petersburg Academy students have created.

There’s not a practical reason for most users to want to switch rapidly between two version of Android, but if you’ve been in the modding scene for a while this could be a godsend. The ability to press a button and flip seamlessly to another instance of Android would be a powerful way to test out new features on a smartphone, and would guarantee that you’re not accidentally destroying the ability to make phone calls on your daily driver.

As it stands right now, switching back and forth between ROMs on your phone can often take 20-30 minutes to fully backup and restore. Even if you’ve got a blank system with no personal data, it’s still a few minutes between flashes where your phone is a very expensive paperweight. If your phone could switch between ROMs the same way Parallels can switch between Mac OS and Windows, that could really change how many users interact with new ROMs.

According to the team responsible for this video, Parallels have been helping the students develop a tool that will make it easy to switch back and forth between ROMs. Your data is intact on both ROMs, but you have the ability to switch back and forth at will. It’s noted in the video that there’s about a 10% hit in battery performance while using this, but for many that’s a pretty small price to pay.

The video shows outdated versions of Android and CyanogenMod running on a Galaxy S2, and mentions a Nexus S being tested currently as well. Apply this to current generation hardware, and if the video is accurately portraying the performance on these ROMs then there’s cause for celebration.

For now, there’s no way to test this out yourself. That’s usually reason enough to be skeptical, but the team responsible claims that Parallels is testing this same software internally. While it seems unlikely that Parallels would announce a major piece of software that would seem to require you to root your phone in order to use it, this video could be all the motivation needed for other Android hackers and modders to move in and work on a community made way to accomplish this same task.